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It was a calamity which might have shaken the fortitude of the very noblest soul, and it had by no means come upon him single handed. Already he had lost his wife, he had suffered from acute and chronic ill-health, he had been bereaved but three weeks previously of another little son.
The father, while these tender and affecting experiments were tried, sat beside her, his eyes laboring under a weight of deep and indescribable calamity, and turning from her face to the faces of those who attempted to recall her reason, with a mute vehemence of sorrow which called up from the depths of their sister's misery a feeling of compassion for the old man whom she had so devotedly loved.
One o'clock was the daily training hour in the playing-fields, and Saturday afternoon four weeks hence was the date fixed for the School sports. It took some days for Railsford's house to accommodate itself to the new order of things imposed upon it. Indeed, it took twenty-four hours for Grandcourt generally to comprehend the calamity which had befallen the disgraced house.
Captain Skinner says, until he became familiar to the screaming sound, he used to start from his sleep, and fancy some appalling calamity had driven the inhabitants of a neighbouring town to rash forth in fear and madness from their homes. Such frightful clamour might attend an earthquake or a deluge.
Nor was this decay of the state felt as a public misfortune merely perhaps by such as had political rights and public spirit; the insurrection of the proletariate, and the brigandage and piracy which remind us of the times of the Neapolitan Ferdinands, carried the sense of this decay into the remotest valley and the humblest hut of Italy, and made every one who pursued trade and commerce, or who bought even a bushel of wheat, feel it as a personal calamity.
She had to write a letter to the "agent," telling him that she did not mean to keep the rendezvous at East Orange, since she had obtained other work, and with difficulty summoned the requisite energy. Every effort was nauseous to her. Her whole nature was absorbed in digesting her one great calamity. Next morning it was the same. Her arms hung listlessly by her side.
Then, papa, surely we are not to live solely for ourselves. There are the miseries and wants of others to be lessened or relieved, calamity to be mitigated, the pale and throbbing brow of sickness to be cooled, the heart of the poor and neglected to be sustained and cheered, and the limbs of the weary to be clothed and rested.
Thou wouldst persist in following thine own evil devices, till thou broughtest thyself to this ill pass; and, had not Allah vouchsafed me to thee, ne'er hadst thou escaped this strait into which thou hast fallen, for they would have cast thee into a calamity whence thou never couldest have won free.
He told Aelred he saw in this calamity a punishment for the devastation he had caused in his invasion of England, and would fain have laid down his royalty, and spent the rest of his days in penitence in a convent; but he was persuaded to relinquish the design, and guard the crown for his grandsons. He shed tears as he tenderly embraced Aelred, and both felt it was their last meeting.
They were as instantly pursued; and when about to be captured, with one voice denounced Bruin as the culprit; though, in fact, it was not he who had struck the blow, and they knew it: but such was his known ferocity and ill-temper, that to shield themselves they were ready to give up the wrong beast, whom no one loved, and whom every one would have suspected as the author of the calamity.